Rendez Vous & Other Stories

Nothing says “I feel utterly at ease being myself while you’re around,” like playing dress-up with your closest friend, unless you’re this fashionista, beckoning the audience to read between the lines.

A beautiful, French brunette, played by Jeanne Damas, opens the apartment door and greets us, as we take on the guest’s point of view. She urges us into the parquet-floored apartment and looks back wondering why we’re hesitating, which makes us, the audience, wonder why we’re hesitating, as well.

She immediately gets passed business and down to the pleasantries – carefree, self-indulgent and irreverent playing of music, words and dress-up. As she flits from playing a vinyl record, to perusing her own blog, to taking pictures of us, to playing the staring game, she flits from outfit to outfit, as if to foreshadow the main event for our stay.

After the dress-up commences, starting from her walk-in closet, we see a tortured soul, who displays a checkerboard montage of mood swings like someone who has bipolar disorder with a touch of masochism, as she struggles to choose a bohemian outfit to stick with. It’s not until we see another person in the room with her that we realize the person she was speaking to the whole time was an Asian food delivery guy – obviously not a close friend of hers, let alone an acquaintance. We were that guy the whole time.

Whilst the bohemian fashionista spins and flails her dresses like a parachute descending to the ground from a recent touchdown, the deliveryman slowly finishes the transaction and exits stage right, leaving us to wonder if this hilarious satire questions if this is how society perceives the fashion world, if it’s how the media portrays it, or if it’s a hyperbolic tapestry of instances of reality.